Grilled Cheese at Scale: A Recipe for Stability Practices

Long-term site stability requires a fundamental shift in perspective: planning for the future vs reacting to catastrophe. Whether it's growing a food festival from 1,500 attendees to 11,000, or dramatically increasing the scale of your production operations, it can be hard to foster acceptance of a new approach while soothing fears about cultural change. In this talk, Connie-Lynne will discuss the techniques of consensus-building, team autonomy, and fast failure she learned while running the Grilled Cheese Invitational, and how she transferred those to her work in Site Reliability Engineering.

Connie-Lynne joined Groupon in 2012, and founded Groupon's Site Reliability Engineering team. Building on her successes with SRE, in January of 2014 she helped start the Engineering Standards and Culture team as the Sr. Manager for Global Engineering Education. With degrees in both Electrical Engineering and Theater Management, Connie-Lynne brings not only 20 years of System Engineering experience to the table, but also a keen understanding of how to connect technical and creative people to each other. Connie-Lynne has worked at Linden Lab, Yahoo, and Caltech, but admits that her most fun position is as a board member for the Grilled Cheese Invitational.